Syrian ‘Moderates’ Aren’t So Moderate In Iraq
Who are the 'moderate' rebels President Obama wants to train and arm?
Robert Fisk - Friday 27 June 2014
Well, God bless Barack Obama hes found some moderate rebels in Syria. Enough to supply them with weapons and training worth $500m. Congress wants to arm these brave freedom fighters, you see. And Obama, having sent his 300 elite Spartan lads to Iraq to help Nouri al-Maliki fight the rebels there, needs to send help to the rebels in Syria even though most of them are on the side of the rebels in Iraq whom Obama wants Maliki to defeat.
Confusing? You bet. So first steps first. Who are the moderate rebels whom Obama wants to train and arm? He doesnt name them and he cant, because the original moderates whom America swore to arm (with the help of the CIA, the Brits, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey) were the so-called Free Syrian Army, mostly composed of deserters from Assads government forces. But the FSA briefly beloved of John McCain until he discovered a pro-al-Qaida fighter sharing a photo-op with him in northern Syria has decomposed.
Its men have gone home, switched to the bearded Islamists of the Nusrah or Isis or Isil if we heed the latest acronym or re-deserted to the government army and taken up arms for Assad again. Some freedom fighters! They werent given enough weapons, we are told. Now theyll get more. And no doubt sell them as they did the last lot. For it is a sad fact of war that whenever a gun crosses a border, it represents not loyalty but cash.
Give an FSA man if you can find one an anti-aircraft missile and it will be sold to the highest bidder. In all the civil wars Ive covered, Ive never seen a weapon in the hands of a militia which hasnt bought it from someone else. In a humiliating interview on Channel 4, our own Defence Secretary admitted that weapons given to Syrian rebels had fallen into the hands of the bad guys. How do you monitor all the guys whom you give a gun to? Send them off with a personal drone to make sure they dont sell it?
Besides, how do you actually find a moderate these days in Syrias war? The Islamist rebels fight to the death. No moderates they. And accursed facts now intervene these are the very same Islamist rebels now threatening the Iraqi state. And just to make things even more confusing, Maliki has just been thanking Assads boys for air-raiding his own rebel enemies on the Iraqi-Syrian border on the grounds that Syria and Iraq are friends.
more...
http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/syrian-moderates-arent-so-moderate-in-iraq-9569548.html